season 4, episode 12 - defining & creating sanctuary
we’re nearing the end of season 4, and our host ash alberg is here to share all about their current biggest creative baby (other than the pod) - their latest book, sanctuary, and all the inspiration and work that are going into it! this isn’t their first book rodeo, but with so many changes in the printing world as well as the differences in their own life and their dear one/photographer samson’s life from their first book together in 2016 to their fourth book now, they’ve had to get even more creative. that’s where the sanctuary hub (the newest addition to the creative coven community) comes in, and you can join in the fun now! we’ve got a special edition live round of the creative coven challenge kicking off next week for hub members, and you can join by visiting ashalberg.com/sanctuary. also keep an eye this week on ash’s main instagram account @sunflowerknit for ig lives with some of your favourite past podcast guests!
take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!
support future seasons of snort & cackle by joining the creative coven community.
transcript
snort & cackle - season 4, episode 12 - defining & creating sanctuary
ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast where every day magic, work and ritual intersect. I'm your host, Ash Alberg, a queer fibre witch and hedge witch. Each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender and Place by Grace Nono.
Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.
Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]
Hello, sweet peas. We are almost at the end of season four of Snort and Cackle, which is wild to me. I can't believe that we are almost at the end of an entire year of this podcast. That just feels magical and incredible, and a really lovely way to like, wrap up this current iteration of this project and focus on some other projects for a little bit, one of which I'm going to focus on today in our episode.
And also, we're not quite done. We've still got our book review episode next week and I'm excited about that one. And I had said in advance of the season, and then also at the very top of this season, that I didn't know what the future held for Snort and Cackle. And if we're being totally honest, I still don't know exactly what the future holds for Snort and Cackle, because we do not have funding currently for the next season.
And that was a boundary that I stated for myself and for my team (my team being my transcriber and Willow) about how we move forward with this. And I guess some grief attached to that, and also honestly, some excitement and some
relief just because I have a lot of shit on my plate right now, just in terms of other projects that need my attention for a little while.
And so I'm honestly okay with taking a bit of a break from recording these episodes and worrying about these episodes every week and putting that energy elsewhere for a little while. I do anticipate coming back to Snort and Cackle and doing future episodes and seasons, and I just don't know the exact timeline for that at this particular moment in time.
But we're not going away and the existing episodes are also not going away, so you'll continue to be able to find them in your podcast feed and at snortandcackle.com, and be able to just keep on re-bingeing your favorite episodes, or if you missed an episode, maybe there was like a two hour episode that came out and you just didn't have time that week, they will be there for you.
And we will just see what the future holds, but I've had a really incredible year of really beautiful conversations with folks. And honestly they have reignited my love for conversation and my joy with the potentials for collaboration, and also my trust in humans a little bit, which is funny when you think of some of the material that we have covered over these last four seasons.
And when I say some, most, let's be honest. We talk about, we talk about racism. We talk about colonialism. We talk about religious trauma. We talk about queerphobia.
We talk about some heavy shit and we also talk about really beautiful things in the exact same conversation. And that is what I love about when you actually give a conversation and people space to breathe and space to go through their feels and talk about something and all of its nuance and actually look at all of the different facets of things.
There's, there’s so much shittiness, especially it feels lately. And I don't think that there's actually like more shittiness than usual in human experience, if we're being totally honest. What is different, I believe, is our access to it, particularly with social media and the internet and the way that those have also influenced our news cycles and things like that.
It's certainly overwhelming for the nervous system, which evolves at a much slower pace. And also we're still resilient creatures. We still find beauty in moments. We are able to experience both incredible pain and amazing beauty.
And I think that we can hold those two things more often than not simultaneously. And actually, I personally believe that it's a necessity to be able to hold the two together when the incredible pain is extra. So, I'm really grateful to all of my guests over the last few seasons who have helped me to see that.
And the other thing that I have personally really loved, especially as a small biz witch, who, again, social media impacts the way that we do business. And there's a connection that can come from, especially when you are like a micro-biz and you do things primarily on your own most of the time, and you're running things out of your studio or your home, and you're not really interacting with other beings on a regular in-person process.
And that can then be like juxtaposed against social media where it feels like we're just being inundated by so many people doing so many cool things. And there's a lot of, I think, comparison that can come out of that, especially where, we curate our lived experience on social media, in the same way that honestly, I curate these conversations, right? Like I'm open about whatever is whatever topic we're talking about, as are my guests.
And also, we all keep certain things to ourselves because they don't need to be made consumption for the general public. And it can be an interesting and difficult line to kind of balance sometimes, and when we are in less healthy headspace, then I think it's very easy to fall into the capitalist trap of considering everyone else who is doing something exactly like you or something like you or not at all like you, but doing it very well or our perception of them doing it very well, and then playing the comparison game.
And I, near the beginning of this podcast, I made a point of the people who intimidated me or who I was like, wow, these witches are like super fucking cool. I've been following them for years. And I'm just going to send them an email and see what happens. [Chuckles.]
And I have had so many of those folks as guests on this podcast, and I've had the most beautiful conversations with them and then have developed really beautiful friendships as a result as well. And the intimidation in terms of admiring them still absolutely exists because these are people who like, know their shit and are just so good at it and create beautiful things that are then offered out to the rest of us.
And I admire that so much about them. And also, I ove that I get to have like super cool chats with them now and get to be like, hey, do you want to do this other cool thing together? That's very fun for me.
So, on that note, I don't know if you have been paying attention to my personal Instagram account over the last few days but we are actually in the midst of launching the Sanctuary Hub which is and kind of subsection of the Creative Coven community, which also incidentally, if you have been looking for ways to support Snort and Cackle, the Creative Coven community is the best space to do that.
And so we've added to it and it just recently launched last week and in the same way that Snort and Cackle, the way to support this particular project is the best and easiest way to do that is through joining the Creative Coven community. My other like ongoing passion project that I can never quite shake is the desire to make books.
And so, Samson Learn and I, Samson is my long-time friend and dear one and photographer for my books. We are working on another book and there were several changes that came as a result of COVID and also just as a result of, we've been at this for a while now. And the old ways that we did things are no longer quite so sustainable, both in terms of the way that some parts of the industries have changed and supply chains have changed, and also just in the fact that like, we're both grown as adults who run our own businesses as our sole sources of income and doing the two to three years’ worth of labor involved in getting a book from creation through to the printing stage, nevermind then going to print, and doing all of that unpaid is not really a smart way of doing business.
And this podcast is all about the magic and also all about the business. And so we're changing things up a little bit. And as part of the launch for this new hub, I have been having really lovely chats with folks on Instagram Live. And you may notice that I think pretty much all of the guests or almost all of the guests are and/or have been guests here on Snort and Cackle.
So basically, I just like to chat with my friends about lovely things. It's cool to see how one conversation can then lead to so many future potentials and there are other guests from Snort and Cackle episodes who will be present in the Sanctuary Hub and potentially in the final book and other ways as well.
Like it's just, it's amazing how connections can start. And then what other collaborations and projects and creative babies can come out of them as well. And I just think that's a really lovely part about being a human in community. And that's also where Sanctuary comes from.
So this episode is probably more so for the boss witches and the knit witches out there. Plant witches will also get a little nerdy about the recipes and things that we're adding in, but I have as a designer, as a knitwear designer, I've been making books since 2016 and I've, I'm a bookworm. [Laughs.] Hardcore. Like I was the kid who would get hit and dodgeball and then reach for my book as I was sitting on the ground waiting for the next round to the start and would walk down the street and the sidewalk and upstairs and sit in restaurants always with my nose in a book.
And then I started knitting and that's like a slightly more socially acceptable thing to do when in group settings. But I just deeply love books. I deeply love the smell of books, the feeling of books. All of it. And so the other cool thing is that as a knitwear designer, whereas other genres of book printing, the self-publishing route can look a little, not as great. I'm thinking particular of 50 Shades of Gray.
There was a reason that book was not being picked up and it is not because of the BDSM. It is because she is a shitty writer. The fact that it became a best seller has nothing to do with the fact that she is a shitty writer. There's that. Within knit publishing world, there's less of that stigma of oh, you couldn't find a publisher and that's why you're self publishing, whether or not that's valid.
And realistically, when you are publishing a knitwear book, if you go with a very large publisher who happens to have a craft branch of their publishing house, that craft branch is real tiny and not getting very many of the resources. I think of when I did my Master's degree at a theater conservatory, and I was doing my Master’s in advanced theater practice, which was devised theater, collaborative devising, and our fees basically went to, honestly like basically all of the Master’s and PhD student’s dollars went to support the Bachelor's film and stage acting students because the school was going to get its name out with the West End Broadway stars and the big movie actors, not with the weirdos who were going up to Edinburgh Fringe.
It's like that when you're dealing with the branches of most of the really big publishing companies. And then the ones that are more dedicated, whether they're really large, like Vogue or smaller, like some of the other like special print presses. You kinda, I feel, I feel like Vogue is almost like an anomaly in that they actually have enough reach that whatever they put out there is probably going to do decently within the industry generally.
But otherwise, like all of the marketing that you need to do, all of the “let's get this out there into the world,” you're still needing to do all of that same stuff the
same way that you would as a self-published person, but you're also getting like a portion of the cheque. So it's not as though knit design books are like gigantic moneymakers most of the time, but at least you get to, when you self publish, control what things look like, what the timelines are, if you need to tweak something or adjust something last minute, then you can do that without needing to ask somebody else's permission.
As Samson and I discovered when we were working on Cwtch, our third book that then came out during COVID, there were so many things that had to shift with that, but one of the biggest ones was that our timeline got pushed by many months and half of the photographs, all of the shawl photos, we'd originally planned on traveling down to Salem, Massachusetts to photograph there with Samson taking the photos, and it got to the point where I took the photos in my home here in Winnipeg. [Laughs.] Because COVID happened and it just was not going away. And then an insurrection happened and yeah.
And so that was an option because we just were able to decide, okay, how do we choose to roll with the punches? And I personally am a control freak. Thank you, Aries. And also there's some Taurus and Capricorn in my chart in really specific spots. And it's generally better for me to maintain more control on these particularly large photo and creative babies, and I am willing to relinquish control of the photographs to Samson because Samson knows my brain well enough, but to hand over too much of it would feel a little, a little sketchy.
And so we are now onto book four. So we made our first book in 2016 and traveled around the east coast of Canada, where part of my family is from and where Samson is from and where half of my home exists. And then our second book, we went to Iceland and we, that was our first one where we started adding in things other than knitting patterns.
So when I'm talking about books, I'm talking about books full of knitting patterns and they have grown over time to include more goodies. So our first book was just knitting patterns and we had so many people talking about how great the photographs were that then we decided, okay, we're going to include a section that's just the travel photographs ‘cause we're in Iceland and it's incredible and Samson's photos are incredible so let’s give people the opportunity to travel by proxy.
And then we also included interviews with fiber artists who lived and worked in Iceland as well. And then of course there were the patterns and then Cwtch was a kind of bigger version of my Everyday Magic collections that I just finished off that particular five-year journey, which were mini collections of knitting
pattern and then also DIY tutorials and recipes and some rituals. And they were created to celebrate the different Sabbats and the wheel of the year.
And so that project ran from 2017 until Beltane of this year, and it has just wrapped up. And so Cwtch was a bigger version of that, where there were then 10 shawl patterns, as well as a bunch of recipes including some herbal remedies and like herbal house cleaning recipes as well.
And then Sanctuary came along mostly because COVID hit. And I was like, what the fuck is this? And my sanctuary and my Sagittarius heart just came roaring to the front and was like, I need to find joy, almost militantly. It was a little intense. I just needed to find optimism and find joy almost to like spite things, like I'm very much of the whole like, when the zombie apocalypse comes, I am going to thrive in order to spite the fuckers. I am not somebody who's let me roll over, and like I'm done.
I go basically the opposite side of the spectrum and I'm like, I'm going to find joy. Fuck you. Where are my flowers? And that's how the idea for Sanctuary came about where I just desperately needed to find joy and find ways of connecting, but I also like deeply missed physical touch and I missed my dear ones.
Most of my dear ones live out on the east coast. And I missed cuddle puddles and I missed like floor picnics in the living room and petting my friends’ faces and things that smell really good all the time. And cozying blanket nests and blanket forts and piles of pillows. And that's what ended up inspiring Sanctuary. I was like, how can I basically take this feeling that I am deeply craving and turn it into a book?
And I lovingly slash half jokingly, half not jokingly refer to it as my fuck you to COVID because the whole concept behind it is like gathering ... imagine just like gathering with your dearest ones in a nest of blankets and quilts on the floor, eating really good food and just like having really deep belly laughs and then doing like massage circles and bubble baths.
Like that's my idea behind Sanctuary. And of course, we're doing boudoir style photography because why would we not? And so that's where this kind of came into place and it's what has inspired this latest collection of patterns and also recipes. And we're going even further with it this time with sewing projects, and we're going to do some cross stitch projects probably.
And I'm figuring out like how I'm collaborating with some different folks and there'll be cocktails and mocktails again, and it's just going to be delightful and I'm really excited about it. And so if you've been listening to the IG Lives that have been happening this week and the replays, assuming the tech is behaving itself, each day are going up as well.
Since we launched the Hub, I have been chatting with people about what their idea and definition of sanctuary is and how they embody it, because I think regardless of where you fall on like a spectrum in terms of sexuality, like whether you are ace or demi or super sexual, or like the ... I think, especially when we think about massage trains and boudoir style photography and things like that, it becomes sexualized really quickly and don't get me wrong, I love that, but I also think that there's a lot of sensuality that we sexualize often unnecessarily.
And then like on the alternate side of it, we like try to, we try to pretend that there's no sexuality in it. That's like the Protestant bit comes in and we're like, nooOoOo, that can't be, and I think that's another kind of bullshit.
And so for me, as a queer-bodied femme, I'm like, okay, how can I take my favorite parts of this and make it feel safe for everyone? Because I think that's a theme I'm hearing from folks when I say, what does sanctuary mean to you? For a lot of folks and potentially for most folks, but I'm not going to say that officially, sanctuary comes down to how you most feel safe.
And so my whole kind of like study and journey with looking into this is how do we feel safe in our bodies? And that's also why I like made a point of this book being about being with my dear ones, but not specifically about being with like romantic partners, because I think that takes a different, that's a different book that I may also write at some point.
But like with the ones who love us deepest and who we allow into those messy parts of ourselves and to see our shadow selves and to see and help us and support us in doing the messiest of work and also the most beautiful of work, like who are those people? And also, how do we make those spaces emotional and physical for ourselves as well?
And there's just so much that is complicated about that as well, depending on people's experience of trauma, people's experience of what society, how society looks at their bodies and then deems them worthy or desirable or unworthy or undesirable.
Age can play into it. Race can come into it. Our physical location, like on the planet comes into it. And so there's no ... like I'm not pretending with this book like it answers everybody's idea of what that can look like. But my idea with this book is, here's my concept of sanctuary. Here's a really beautifully photographed idea of what it looks like for me, and here are some of the projects that are involved in creating that in my day-to-day life, whether that's a knitting pattern or how to sew a quilt or an herbal remedy for infusing specific plants into oils to make really lovely massage oils and then massage bars. And then like here's a really yummy snack recipe and here's some ideas for infused water.
Those are all just ideas that are then being offered to the reader for them to make themselves, and also to get the juices going on their own creative journey of making their own version of sanctuary. Mine just happens to be really queer and filled with all of my favorite humans and apparently with a very berry-infused colour palette.
And so, it's so much fun and there's no way that I am doing an adequate job of explaining what my process is behind this, but that's also partly why I've created the Hub, because like I mentioned at the beginning it's like a two to three year adventure anytime we're writing these books. And generally, honestly, like when I'm working on the end of one of the books, I'm also starting the next one, so like I'm working pretty much full-time on Sanctuary these days in between the rest of running my business, which is part of where we're going with this. And I'm also pretty actively gathering ideas and creating mood boards and swatching for my next book as well.
There's ... this is just what happens when you have Aries ping-pong brain, you're just always on the go with different things. But that being said, the amount of labor that goes into one of these books is like two to three years’ worth of labor. A large chunk of that of which is the equivalent of a regular person's full-time for at least a year and a half.
And that's just because there's no way for me to speed up certain parts of it. Like I can't make the knee-high socks that I'm knitting knit themselves any faster. Like it's just not physically possible, not without injuring myself and probably at some point I'll trip up and then have to frog back, and so then, like you just, you go at your regular speed.
And it's a huge amount of labor. And typically in book world, self-published book world, at least, and you may have also noticed this if you support like tarot
decks and things like that, often you don't see people looking for support for those projects.
And I think this is also why, honestly, a number of these projects, you hear authors being like, “I've worked on this for eight years on and off.” And it's because it took so much fucking time that they couldn't devote to it full time that it did take them eight years because they had to like chip away at it in the wee hours, in between all of their other things that they're doing.
Whereas if somebody were to just be like, here's your expenses covered for a year, go write your book, it would be written within the year. And so often you'll see these, these projects come up when it's time to go to print. And that's when you'll see a Kickstarter open. Often I'm finding them on Kickstarter these days but people might also use, GoFundMe or they might use Indiegogo.
The all other alternative is that you'll see people who are doing almost like, they create like many books that then can come together into a full book over time through Patreon. And those platforms take massive fucking fees. Like it's ridiculous.
So when you're supporting somebody on something like Patreon or Kickstarter ... I think Kickstarter right now is about a 10% fee. So if you support somebody with, let's say a $25 donation, they're getting 90% of that minus then also the processing fee from whatever, like whether it's PayPal or a credit card company or Stripe or whatever.
So when you pledge somebody $25, they are not receiving that full $25 from you. And that's just the realities of running a business online. I, when somebody places an order from my store and they order either by paying with Stripe or they pay with PayPal, like I don't get the full amount. There are fees that come off of that amongst all the other costs of doing business.
But there's even more fees that come off when you're using these third-party platforms. And the other thing with those third-party platforms is that they are very specific sometimes about what projects they're comfortable backing and which ones they're not, so witchy, sex-positive, sexuality slash sensuality, herbalism things are not always going to find a happy home on these platforms.
Sometimes they can fly under the radar but if they don't, you can get royally fucked. And you also, and like needing to commit to things that you may or may not be able to commit to. And so that's where we ran into problems and got me thinking about how do we do this time around when our publishing house that is
about an hour away from my home, they were like, oh yeah, we now need your confirmed book order with the confirmed number of how many books you want printed and the deposit down at least six months in advance of when we will have the books ready for you.
And that's just because of supply chain issues. And they're not expecting them to get any better, and in fact, they are expecting them to get worse. So, in the past, the way that Samson and I would do books is, I would do all of the work involved in getting the books ready. I would be writing the books. I'd be getting the patterns, tested, tech-edited, all of that stuff.
We would closer to the time of publication, do the photo shoot, and then we would get all of that final layout done. And then we would send it to whoever was printing our book and usually after doing a couple of back and forths, we would have it ready to go.
And from that first, “Hey, can you check out this draft to make sure it's going to work for your printing presses,” to okay, I've got the books back in my hand, it was a six to eight week process. And so we would just do pre-orders for the book and we never really got into impressive, like “We just paid for all of the labor involved in this,” territory, but we certainly would cover our printing expenses through pre-orders.
But that's with having the books in hand within a couple of months and feeling okay with placing those pre-orders and having people give us their money that far in advance, including our wholesale partners, who of course make up a pretty significant number of the, of the actual books that we're printing as well.
And then we found out it was going to be at least six months and that doesn't feel quite so good for those pre-orders anymore, because we have to put money down on our end, but I personally don't feel comfortable taking that much money from that many people that far in advance of when I know I'm going to have their book ready to ship off to them.
There just feels like so many things that can go wrong within that chunk of time. And so, it also got me thinking, okay, if we're not going to do our traditional method of pre-orders to then cover some of the costs relatively soon to when we're doing a lot of the other more expensive portions of this project, including whatever travel may or may not be associated with the photography plus whatever else is associated with the photography.
The photo shoot costs a fair amount. And also the tech editing tends to all ... like those final parts of puzzle are some pretty large individual bills that are on top of my own ongoing labor over the many months in advance. And so I started thinking about it and I was like, this is not the most sustainable business model in the same way that I was forced to look at Snort and Cackle and be like, oh, after the grant runs out, we can't actually afford to keep this going the way that it is going.
And the lovely thing is that I have the Creative Coven community and it already existed. And so we just added ... And so that's where the Sanctuary Hub comes into play, because the other thing that happens when you are writing a book, in the same way that like, if you're making a movie or you're writing a play or you're writing a, like a regular book, like a fiction book, there are many pieces that get left behind.
They get tossed on the cutting room floor because they just don't fit. And it's not because ... sometimes it's because they're shit. But often it's because there's just not enough space. And, if I had my way, I would have every single recipe that I wanted included in this book and I would have so many different patterns and I would have all of Samson's photos included and there's just, there's so much goodness that literally cannot fit.
And one very specific example of that for Sanctuary is that I mentioned a knee-high sock earlier. And so one of the things that I started working on when I was working on the patterns for Sanctuary was that I wanted to create a custom fit knee-high sock formula, because when I think of sexy knits, bras are not one of the things that I think of as being sexy.
Maybe that's because of the fibers that I use but I don't really want right next to that particular part of my skin. Same thing goes for knit underwear. I don't understand it. I don't know why you would do it. If that's your thing, cool beans, it's not mine. [Laughs.] And what I do think is super sexy is tall socks, hand knit socks that are perfectly fitted to you.
And as somebody with larger thighs and larger calves, I have never been able to find a ... I can barely find like boots that fit me if they come above my ankle, nevermind a well-fitting sock. And I started looking around and I realized that there's very few taller sock patterns and when you can find them, they run off of either the math that honestly, like I don't even have that large of a leg if we're being totally honest and they never even get up to as wide as my calf gets.
And when they have a formula that they're recommending, if you want to make your own pattern, that formula is based off of measurements that again are like, not really that accurate. It's based off of, oh, if this is your measurement in this one spot, then obviously that means that your measurement in this other spot is going to be this. And bodies are way more unique than that and I'm not interested in making something that doesn't even fit my body, nevermind the majority of other people's bodies.
It's not my job as a knitting designer to make a pattern that fits every single body perfectly. That is impossible. That being said, I am very interested in finding, particularly with socks, something that can be understood easily enough that somebody could create their own custom fitting sock.
And for the rest of my patterns, my job isn't to make it perfectly fitting for every single body but my job is to write a clearly written pattern with enough information so that somebody can look at it and make decisions relatively easily about where they need to tweak if they need to tweak, or if there's too much tweaking and they don't want to bother with.
As a sewist, I'm very used to that. There are certain companies that I just don't even touch because their body block that they use is so different from my physical body that it's going to require more modifications that I'm willing to do because I'm a lazy sewer and that's okay. So when it comes to knitting, the sweater patterns in this book in particular are gonna very much lean towards a construction that allows for those easier tweaks for people.
But then this sock formula, unfortunately, once I started working on it, I realized that it is not quite so easily broken down into a page or two of really clear instruction. That's where the Sanctuary Hub can come in. And so I was able to then be like, okay, if I can't do it this way, but I really love it and I want these socks to be included in the photoshoot, and I need a reason to make that valid, then I can record a video class about how to make these custom fitting socks.
And it, like much more easily break it down via video so that there's the clearer visual aids for folks. And then also have the link to a worksheet that then people can be plugging their numbers in so that then that can be spitting out the formula for them, and then the math for them when they're knitting their own socks.
That's like a really specific example of what you can find within the Hub, but it's just, it offers so much opportunity for us to be able to take the pieces that
may not fit into the final book but absolutely feed into the project as a whole and share them there.
It also is a space where, for the people who really give a shit, that they can be supporting the ongoing work involved in the book and also get access to the behind the scenes of it and the reasons behind what we're doing and the resources that all of the different pieces of inspiration that float around in my orbit and that I pulled together to then create, to create the book and for folks to be able to just find those in one obvious, easy space to find, rather than trying to cobble together social media posts that may or may not actually end up in your feed, may or may not get censored or shadow banned, also are just like floating around on the internet and not being compensated.
Like the amount of work that goes into all of that is, is also significant and it's fun, but it's, if you're not interested in it, then it's okay, why, if this is going to be a large part of my world for the next chunk of time for my audience that is less interested in it, I don't necessarily want to inundate them with it entirely. And for the folks that are really interested in it, I don't want them to miss parts of it.
And so the Sanctuary Hub is a really nice spot to be able to pull those things together for the folks who really give a shit, and for the rest of folks, then, you'll get snippets of it, but it's not going to completely overwhelm your feed for too much of the time.
It’s overwhelming my life right now. There's that. But I don't know exactly what, how to wrap this conversation up in a nice little bow, but I think ... [Sighs.] It's, it's a nice little like jumping off board into, where is my own personal focus going to be for the next while as Snort and Cackle is wrapping up the season and going dormant for the next little bit.
There's, there's somewhere else that you can find me and other work that I am working on that you will be able to engage with if you're interested, that also definitely has overlap with a number of our guests. You're also going to find several of our guests amongst the launch IG Live interviews. You are also going to find some of them within the Hub, either within the exclusive shop that's there or within some of the projects and recipes.
There's some really fun collaborations that are coming as a result of this. And the other thing is that we are running a live round of the Creative Coven challenge again, starting ... so this is coming out on July 6th, which is of course our Wednesday, and then July 11th to 15th, so next week. So if you're listening to
this in time we're going to be running another live challenge or another live round of the Creative Coven challenge, sanctuary themed this time.
So I've actually made a special mood board and playlist again for us. That is how we always do our Creative Coven challenges which is my signature swatching challenge. But this time I'm giving you some of the images and pieces that have inspired me in creating this book, and you're going to use that as your own jumping off board to see what you end up making from it.
And I'm really excited to see what folks end up creating, especially because I've just been living amongst these images and these sensations and sounds for so long at this point, and so I'm excited to see what other people's takes are on them. So you can join us for the ... we'll be recording our Zoom gatherings, which will be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week, and you'll be able to watch replays if you're not able to join us live.
And of course, the mood board and the playlist will remain within the Hub as well so that if you don't join us live or if you do, and then you want to go back to it later that you're able to go back to it at any time as well. But yeah, I'm really excited for this and I'm excited to see folks starting to make the different recipes, and I'm really excited to see some knee-high socks starting to come out of the online class about it.
And yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm just generally excited. I think the other thing that I'm particularly happy about with this project in particular is how it came from something that was honestly really shitty. Like it literally came because I felt so isolated and I so desperately, deeply craved the touch of my friend's skin and I couldn't see them for so long.
And as of the time of recording this, I still haven't seen them for years in person, most of them. And I can't wait. And I'm also just really pleased that humans are able to take shitty things and turn them into sources of inspiration.
And maybe that's where we end this. Snort and Cackle also came as a result of isolation and not being able to travel and have conversations with folks that I was really inspired by in their fiber businesses, and I wanted to chat with more people and talk to them about what made them tick and what magic means to them and how magic appears in their daily lives and in their work lives.
We've got a couple of really big, very lovely and fulfilling, at least on my end, projects that have come as a result of a really shitty situation. COVID sucked,
continues to suck. It's not gone. But I think that there's something within that in the same way that there is benefits to be found in doing messy shadow work.
And in from my clowning days, we talked about embracing the flop so that when something didn't work on stage, that you embrace that and you learn from it and you use it to do something better next time, or to at least do something different. Maybe it's not better. But that's what we're doing.
We're taking a shitty pandemic and turning it into a Sagittarius-infused optimist hunt for joy. And so, I suppose I just, I will wish that for you in general in your life as we end this episode and move ourselves forward.
And of course we still have our one episode left, our book review episode for the season, but until the next time I chat with you, I hope that you hunt for joy and that you find it at least some of the time, more of the time. Thanks so much for listening sweet peas.
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